Mom is finally selling houses! Problem is she isn’t licensed. No big whoop for her, the test will be a breeze! Except she freaks when she meets Kim, a mega realtor who’s sold 358 houses and is getting recertified. She walks out of the test, assuaging her failure with a Chipwitch. Mmmm…now that’s something I can get behind: Chipwitch and a mostly Mom-centric episode.

David Chang suggested that James Murphy eat at Uchi like a jerk, except he was an actual jerk, and living proof that sometimes friends are mean.

Well, just kidding. How was David Chang to know that Uchi wouldn’t let in the erstwhile LCD Soundsystem frontman because the restaurant was booked (do you know who he is?)? Murphy chronicled a week in his gastro-adventurous life for Grub Street’s “New York Diet”, and dished on everything from his Aziz Ansari-gifted juicer to the underwhelming Nori at Uchiko (at which he was eventually seated).

Why do we care about James as a food enthusiast? Oh, we don’t know, maybe because he’s throwing the LuckyRice Asian food festival with Danny Bowien, and co-hosting the Bombay Sapphire East Cocktail Dumpling Party?

“Dinner was on a plane: A sad shrimp cocktail, ‘salad,’ and a mass of fused ravioli in red barf on the AA flight from JFK to Austin, the horror only slightly mitigated by the cookies n’ cream ice cream, which further engendered my raging self-hate, transitioning to an entirely different mode of loathing, from the I guess I deserve this feeling caused by scarfing down the savory portion of the meal to the I am a fat nightmare of the sweets.”

As for that Uchi fail:

“Dinner was at Uchiko, recommended by Dave Chang. Actually, he recommended Uchi, but I couldn’t get in because it was too late notice, and too small. But at Uchiko I walked up and was able to get a place at the sushi bar. I was with my friend Jill, and I got the omakase, and at the end I asked for individual pieces.

The dinner was good. Not to be nitpicky, but there were a couple of times that the nori was rubbery, which means it sat too long. I didn’t think that would happen at a sushi bar, but I was getting things from different stations at the sushi bar. But it was good. Jill really loved it, and I got a lot of tasty stuff. But that to me was like, Wow, that I would not have expected at such a vaunted spot.”

Snobby rock star.

He even cooks dinner with his girlfriend, using the Noma cookbook:

“She’s much more intuitive and has a better palate, but I’m blindly confident. I’ll be like, ‘Let’s make this!’ And she’ll be like, ‘That’s from the Noma cookbook; that’s like three days of prep.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, I’ll go forage!’ It’s kind of like that.”

Check out more from Murphy’s food diary, including that Aziz juicer story, here.